IRISH AND BLACKS: THE TIES THAT BIND

Kevin M. Doyle.Kevin M. Doyle, a second-generation Irish-American, is a lawyer who works on behalf of Death Row inmates in AlabamaCHICAGO TRIBUNE

"The Irish are not noted for their fondness for the colored." The observation, casually made in the film "Glory," somehow fails to startle. The bitter history between Irish- and African-Americans, early rivals at the labor market's bottom, has a peculiar resonance. Not too many years ago, a noted sociologist rated modern Irish Catholics among America's most tolerant ethnics. Having done so, he then confessed that he himself, if black, would still distrust the Irish.

In 1988, conspiracy-spinners fancied IRA race-cultists to have been attackers of Tawana Brawley. In the wake of Los Angeles' turmoil last spring, commentators readily recalled those black New Yorkers lynched by Irish draft rioters during the Civil War. Recent months have found New York's first African-American mayor under attack, from prelate and pundit, over the sponsorship squabbles prefacing the St. Patrick's Day parade.

For a change, therefore, we Irish-Americans would today do well to recall a few old positive ties between the black and Irish communities, some common, hope-giving past overlooked amidst our usual ingrown celebration.

We might note, for instance, that in 1845 an eloquent black iconoclast, who had fled his American enslavement, received no warmer a welcome than in Ireland itself. Crowds gathered in Cork, Dublin and Belfast to greet him. He heard nationalist arch-hero Daniel O'Connell rally support for the international abolitionist crusade. Endorsing the cause of Irish home rule, the fugitive slave was himself hailed as the "black O'Connell."

Forty years passed before Frederick Douglass again saw Ireland. But contacts kept up. The Irish Ladies Anti-Slavery Society sent money for slaves in flight to freedom.

During Ireland's 1845-49 potato famine, the American abolitionist community eagerly answered the call to alms. Much more moving, by at least one report, "negro slaves" themselves mustered the will and means to send relief to Ireland's starving masses!

Also a part of the Irish-African legacy of the 19th Century were the true "black Irish," Americans who combined in them the blood of both an island's immigrants and a continent's captives: Jesuit Patrick Healy, born to a Roscommon who illegally married an enslaved Georgian woman, became known both as the first black American to earn a Ph.D. and a president of Georgetown University. His brother James Healy won installation as America's first black Catholic bishop in 1875. That was probably not long after the wedding of Muhammad Ali's maternal great-grandparents, a "free colored woman" and a County Clare immigrant, and perhaps during the lifetime of the great-great Irish grandfather Alice Walker celebrates.

Best, there is one of the men for whom my son Aedan Martin King Doyle is named. Rev. King could profess Celtic roots from an Irish great-grandmother on his father's side.

Of course, come the 20th Century, King was not the only figure to bring Irish ancestry to America's belated struggle for racial equality. New Dealer Frank Murphy, attorney general, Supreme Court Justice and NAACP board member, recognized discrimination as "the most un-American . . . thing in our life today." Likewise, as Harvard most un-American. Law Professor Charles Ogletree notes, Justice William Brennan was second to none in ferreting out the racism beneath our selective resort to the death penalty.

When Autherine Lucy sought enrollment at the University of Alabama, campus chaplain Emmet Gribbin, a grandson of Irish immigrants, was a voice of conscience enduring physical attack on the front lines. Archbishop Patrick O'Boyle's invocation opened the 1963 March on Washington.

Women such as SNCC's Connie Curry (first-generation Irish Protestant) and Mary O'Neil Good (third generation Irish Catholic) organized and struggled in deepest Dixie in the earliest days. Tex-Irish John Howard Griffin first lived and then wrote "Black Like Me," opening an empathetic window into Jim Crow. With "The Other America," Michael Harrington, born of a "very lace curtain" Irish family in St. Louis, made America own up to its Negro "race-class condemned by heredity to be poor."

John F. Kennedy, false starts aside, first used the Oval Office to cast segregation as a moral issue and initiated the most important civil rights legislation of this century.

Old polls suggest these individuals were not wholly unreflective of at least Catholic Irish opinion. Lest heads swell, though, the name Connor, as in Eugene "Bull" Connor, occurs frequently among the Irish. When school desegregation moved North, Celtic Boston did not exactly glisten with good will. And we have all profited from the fair wages and opportunities stolen from generations of African-Americans.

Most importantly, genuine equality still eludes America. After today's parades and tonight's parties, there will be plenty of opportunity to better the home we Irish have the good fortune to share.